Estado alterado de conciencia

Butoh

"It's alright to call your own way of living for butoh - but I don't like that which is
happening on stage to be called butoh. It is rather so that all the way from my birth till I
die, I want to dance all the time." (Min Tanaka)

Like the dramas of more primitive cultures, butoh opposes a professionalization of its
art. Though many dancers have reached an incredible perfection, it is not the technical
level which means anything, but the spiritual, and many of the foremost butoh dancers
have begun without any other dance background.

"Straight legs are engendered by a world dominated by reason. Arched legs are born of
a world which cannot be expressed in words." (Hijikata)

Butoh wants to transcend the identity of the sex. "There is a fish which is born male,
experiences the degeneration of its male organs and ends life transformed into female.
This displays the primordial formation of male/female as a whole. It is said this male and
female coupled to give birth to an egg ... a strange tale! During its life, this fish
experiences both male and female existences ... it contains the origin of Mankind, when
the fish first appeared to inhabit the earth." (Ushio Amagatsu)

Butoh is not a muscle dance. Endurance comes from the spiritual state. The slow,
Susanna explained, is only slow-looking. On the level of the contrary powers, the pace
is huge. Butoh, thus, expresses something entirely different through using the surfaces
of the bodies not as surfaces of physical objects, something "pretty" e.g., but as the
point of intersection between the contrary powers
In the late 1960s, horror/exploitation director Teruo Ishii hired Hijikata to play the
role of a Doctor Moreau-like reclusive mad scientist in his film Horrors of

Malformed Men[5] a role that is mostly performed as dance. The film has remained
largely unseen in Japan for forty years because it was viewed as insensitive to
the handicapped. [6]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa used Butoh movement for actors in his 2001 film Kairo, remade in
Hollywood in 2006 as Pulse. The re-make did not feature Butoh.
Butoh performance features heavily in Doris Drrie's 2008 film Cherry Blossoms, in which a
Bavarian man embarks on a journey to Japan to grieve for his late wife and develop an
understanding of this performance style for which she held a life-long fascination.